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SEO is now PR, but are PR agencies still not ready?

SEOs recognise this, and the majority are now carrying out online PR: whether they call it that or not, all decent SEOs are now creating content and reaching out to online influencers.

General marketers realise this. In a survey we recently conducted of 250 UK marketers, 52% said that PR and SEO work closely together in their organisation, and a whopping 71% think their PR agencies are experts at SEO.

But how are those PR agencies performing in their newfound position as SEO experts?

A majority of those marketers, 61%, said they do not have sufficient SEO knowledge in house, so it’s no surprise they are relying on agency expertise. But it seems that many PR agencies are still playing catch up, and are potentially underserving their clients.

SEO as a PR service offering

This suspicion is based on what PR agencies have told us ourselves through their most powerful tool to offer SEO as a service.

Our research partner Retortal has a huge index of websites in the UK, and crawled the sites for those with ‘PR’ in their home page title, concluding that those sites were primarily companies offering PR services.

They then crawled those sites found, looking for the term ‘SEO’ anywhere on the site, the assumption being that if they were offering SEO as a service that they’d have the sense to mention it on their website somewhere.

A mere 26% were found to have any mention of SEO, leaving 74% that don’t. We can assume that these sites fall into two categories of PR company; those that do offer SEO services but have failed to implement basic SEO practice on their own site in mentioning it, and those that just don’t offer it at all.

If you ask me, either mistake is pretty heinous.

Is SEO a separate PR service?

One response to this could be, if PR and SEO are the same thing, why do PR agencies even need to offer SEO as a separate service? As a PR agency that does offer SEO as a service to clients, it’s a question we’ve come across.

The simple response is that an agency sells expertise and time, and SEO is more of both. Especially when it involves extensive site audits, on-site changes and keyword research, the more technical bits of SEO that are less closely related to PR.

But taking a step back, the fundamental difference is to do with objectives. The objective of SEO is ultimately to drive more quality traffic to the website. That can be a PR objective, but more ordinarily PR’s remit is further up the funnel, generating awareness of a business, brand or person, or more generally managing the public perception of them.

Thinking of the two as services and the buying process of a potential client, offering the two as separate services is essential because buyers do not first think in terms of services, they think in terms of problems and objectives. This means –

“I’d like more quality organic search traffic to my website, so I need SEO.”

OR “I’d like more people to be aware of my business, or to solve a particular perception problem, so I need PR.”

Perhaps in time this may change, but at the moment that is the common buying thought process, as born out by the fact that searches for ‘PR agency’ and searches for ‘SEO agency’ are continuing to converge. And while that is the case, PR agencies not offering SEO services are going to fall behind.

Recommended

I hate the word granular. I spend half my life tweaking and fiddling with PPC campaigns across different platforms.

The word granular invariably means spending even more time setting up campaigns. The problem is, the only way to achieve, monitor and maintain success in PPC is by going granular. The same holds true for Google Product Listing Ads.

I first went granular with my bog standard AdWords search network text ads soon after starting out in PPC. I went granular with my Product Listing Ads at a much later stage however.

When I first setup Product Listing Ads (PLAs) I had to do so with the assistance of the official Google documentation and a few third party guides. It’s all a bit fiddly.

Most of these guides seemed to encourage large ad groups for one reason or another. Against my better judgement I just went along with it, wasting thousands of pounds in the process.

This year while covering similar areas to the previous, there are a few differences. Below are some of the things we are looking for, but better yet,take our survey before the start of next week and you’ll get a complimentary copy of the report worth $695 before anyone else gets a look!

The decline in visitors impacts the performance of ads, which hits revenue. Under pressure from the publisher and ad sales team, the media title’s SEO and editorial teams try to reverse engineer Google’s update and work out new tactics that will improve their search engine performance.

However, a key objective of the Hummingbird update is to accommodate the fact that more searches are being conducted, and more content is being consumed, on smartphones.

As people are beginning to use their smartphone’s voice recognition functions to actually talk to Google search apps, Google has started to respond to search terms given in natural speech, a key part of the Hummingbird update.

‘Big whoop’, right? No. Massive whoop, especially for the 68% of the UK’s 175 top publishers do not have a digital site that displays effectively for mobile devices.